When I started my messy breakup with cheap chicken,
one of the immediate complications I found was, well, how do you define
“cheap chicken”? (And, by extension, what is “good” or “sustainable”
chicken?) By cheap chicken, I meant some kind of admittedly vague
combination of chicken that is treated poorly while it’s alive; that’s
of questionable healthfulness, for both bird and man; that’s slaughtered
cruelly; that’s produced in a way that damages the environment — all
of which are endemic to an industry that prioritizes low price above
all. But with buzzwords like “sustainability” and even “organic” thrown
about all willy-nilly, it’s hard to know what we even mean by them. And
it’s especially hard since marketers realized that more and more people
are willing to pay more money for products with those words on them.

So, when you’re shopping for chicken, what do labels like “free
range” or “pastured” really mean? Which chickens fall in line with
everything you want, and which ones do you know you might make some kind
of compromise for? I called two experts, Tom Schneller,
who teaches meat identification and butchery at the Culinary Institute
of America (and the man who taught me how to break down chicken), and Mark Kastel, co-founder of the Cornucopia Institute, an advocacy group for family farms and a fierce “organic” production watchdog.

The first thing Mr. Kastel said to me was kind of dispiriting:
“Well, some of those labels just mean whatever the marketer happens to
want them to mean.” Some terms, like “organic,” have legal definitions
and actual enforcement. Others have definitions but not much enforcement
infrastructure, and some, still, are utterly unmoored to the law.
Here’s a breakdown.